Every day is Groundhog Day

I no longer wake groggily from my drunken slumbers wondering what day of the week it is. Because now every day is Groundhog Day.

The evidence that we are trapped in a time loop is evident in the headlines: Greece battling with its never-ending financial crisis, doctors wanting to tax sugar, and idiots proving incapable of reading the warnings at the end of the Holy Island causeway.

The Greek people thought they had been offered a way out through a referendum, giving them the opportunity to say “no” to EU-imposed austerity.

Ignoring the evidence of all previous history that votes against the EU have no relevance, and cannot be allowed to stand.

The plain fact, obvious to all intelligent observers from the outset, is that you cannot have a successful single currency without a fiscal union, which in turn demands a full political union.

This sort of “beneficial crisis” was always part of the plan to bring that glorious day closer, though if it is happening at all it seems to be doing so in slow motion.

Partly, no doubt, because all pro-EU national governments feel themselves under threat, whether from the growth of left-wing anti-austerity parties in the poorer south or the parallel rise of right-wing Farageiste nationalist ones in the richer north.

Source: www.statista.com

The latter show little appetite for wealthier countries subsidising the poorer ones, as political union would inevitably entail. And who can blame them, considering the ungracious response of poorer countries like Scotland to the fiscal transfers they receive in the political union called the UK?

We owe a huge debt of gratitude to Sir John Major and Gordon Brown for keeping us out of the continuing euro mess, at any rate up to now. Though if we vote to distance ourselves even further in our promised in-out EU referendum, remember that the political elite reserves the right to ignore results it does not like.

Meanwhile the British Medical Association proposes a fiscal transfer of another kind, by taxing the sugary drinks beloved of poor people to subsidise the fresh fruit and vegetables favoured by the middle classes.

I can still remember the first time my mother asked me to nip to the greengrocer and buy her a cabbage, more than 50 years ago. Used as I was to forking out sixpence (2½p) for a bar of chocolate, I queried whether the half crown (12½p) she had handed me would be enough for something so huge. I think it cost tuppence (less than 1p).

I was staggered by what great value fresh vegetables were then, and have been ever since. Their place in the forefront of the supermarket price war pretty much guarantees that this will continue.

We could all feed our families cheaply and more healthily if we bought cheap cuts of meat, and fresh fruit and vegetables when in season (or frozen ones when not), and cooked proper meals from scratch.

But we live in a topsy-turvy world where the poorest in our society are also likely to be the fattest, because they are the most reliant on takeaways and convenience food.

Might better education rather than new complexes of taxes and subsidies not be the answer to this conundrum? And if that is not feasible, why not simply invoke the terrorist threat to declare a state of emergency and reintroduce the ration book, which did so much to improve the health of the nation during World War 2?

There is zero evidence from around the world that attempts to tax particular foods will have any effect at all on their consumption.

But why bother with evidence when you are on a mission, whether that be to create a United States of Europe or to build a healthier, slimmer, fitter society in which doctors would be out of a job. (Has the BMA really thought this through, I wonder?)

It’s surely much more fun to take the approach of those bold individuals approaching the Holy Island causeway to find it underwater.

All previous attempts to cross it under these conditions may have resulted in cars being written off and their occupants ignominiously rescued from refuges. But this particular Groundhog Day will be different, won’t it?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

"I told you I was ill"

In Iolanthe, W.S. Gilbert’s Westminster sentry ponders the mysterious fact that every child born into the world alive “Is either a little Liberal, or else a little Conservative”.

This was, of course, before the Labour Party, let alone UKIP or the Greens, had been invented.

Conservatives possibly outnumbering Liberals in this scene from Iolanthe

Yet I increasingly think that there is indeed a fundamental two-way division in humanity, between the optimists and the pessimists.

Whether it is determined biologically or by environment I cannot say, but I do know that the pattern is set early. Because my two sons are both under six, and I definitely have one of each.

The elder, like me, approaches every proposal with a mindset of “What could possibly go wrong?” He is likely to spend his life wondering “What’s the catch?” and turning down opportunities that might, through a concatenation of infinitely remote possibilities, lead to disaster.

The younger, like his mother, has an altogether sunnier disposition. For him, the glass will always be half full rather than half empty.

I am not sure that I can do anything to change their respective attitudes. What interests me is which of them is likely to be happier.

It might seem a no-brainer. The pessimist will live his life in a perpetual fog of gloom and shy away from such possible excitements as space travel, cosmetic surgery or voting Labour.

Not one for Charlie Hann, I suspect

Yet I am a pessimist so extreme that I have never yet boarded an aeroplane without a deep conviction that it is much more likely to crash in flames than to reach its destination.

Which, since so far it has always managed the latter, has given me periods of elation that I am sure no normal traveller could hope to match.

Always expect the worse, and life will throw up regular pleasant surprises.

We spend a lot of time wondering about the time and manner of our death, us pessimists, so I naturally pitched up at Wansbeck General Hospital a week ago fully braced for the worst.

My mood had not been lifted by receiving a summons from the Department of Elderly Medicine, even if I could detect the hand of some well-meaning PR looking for a kinder way to express “Geriatric”.

Nor was it helped by seeing a doctor in a room that bore a sign reading “Pre-Surgical Assessment”.

But then, as it turned out, while I have indeed got a long list of things wrong with me, so would most 60-year-olds subjected to the same battery of tests.

In particular, I am no more likely to keel over with a stroke tomorrow than any other comically overweight and inactive non-smoker of my age.

True, this left the doctor with no explanation for the symptoms I have been experiencing, though he did kindly offer to refer me to another specialist for yet more tests.

However, in the week of Groundhog Day, it seemed better simply to draw stumps and add a few more irritating conditions to the long list of things one just has to learn to live with as one gets older.

Receiving this good news should have lifted me onto the sort of high that I normally experience only after stepping off a plane alive and making it through Arrivals without being the subject of a terrorist attack.

However, a new attack of pessimism soon kicked in as I realised that I could no longer put off a long list of important decisions that I had put on hold in the light of my clearly imminent demise.

I resolved to be nicer to everyone if I were to be spared, and I think it lasted about as long as most such resolutions. But I will keep trying.

In the long run, my pessimist son and I will be proved right, and can only hope that we have enough dying breath to utter the magic words “I told you I was ill.”

The humourless Church establishment prevented Spike Milligan’s family from having those words engraved on his tombstone, until they proposed putting them in incomprehensible Irish.

Since I lack Spike’s Irish roots, I wonder whether one of my readers might be able to assist my preparations by supplying a suitable Latin translation?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The PR pathway to the very top

Hands up everyone who felt that “a new dawn has broken, has it not?” after last month’s general election. Were you not seduced by the promise of a youthful, innovative coalition, drawn from a squeaky clean new House of Commons, purged of expenses fiddlers by popular anger?

Those of us of a right-wing disposition looked forward to being able to buy the Daily Telegraph again, without being bored rigid by daily accounts of some unknown MP’s furniture purchases and the fact that he shockingly had the stuff delivered to his constituency home, where someone was in to sign for it, rather than an empty Westminster flat.

And what do we find? The news is so much like Groundhog Day that I keep thinking of that badge I used to see during the elections of the 1970s: “If voting changed anything, they’d abolish it.”

Although it attracted little comment at the time, I was struck during my long and pointless post-election vigil by the number of MPs returned with comfortable majorities despite having been at the very heart of the expenses scandal. For some reason the name of Hazel Blears springs immediately to mind.

Perhaps Liberal Democrats escaped closer scrutiny because they were drawn from a joke party seen to stand no chance of actually taking office. But now the Treasury has become a sort of shooting gallery, with David Laws already despatched because of his undeclared partner, and Danny Alexander in the firing line because of his alleged avoidance of capital gains tax.

If this ploy works, the process will presumably continue until the supply of Liberal Democrat candidates is exhausted, and Mr Cameron is forced to appoint a Conservative who shares the Telegraph’s prejudice against raising capital gains tax. Which would be ironic, to say the least. It would also be likely to precipitate the break-up of the coalition, but maybe that is the true objective.

The other argument being advanced against Mr Alexander is that he knows nothing about economics, and his previous biggest responsibility was as head of communications for the Cairngorms National Park.

Can this really be a valid objection when the Prime Minister’s only job outside politics was a seven year stint as director of corporate affairs (or chief spin doctor) for the ITV company Carlton Communications, in the course of which he acquired something of a reputation among financial journalists for not always telling the whole truth?

Nick Clegg, too, is a former lobbyist, which is the badge PR men like to wear when they are operating in the field of “public affairs”.

Far from being a new dawn, casting aside the black arts of spin employed by the likes of Lord Mandelson and Alastair Campbell, the election of 2010 marks the very apotheosis of PR.

According to the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (of which I am not a member) there are now more than 48,000 people employed in PR in the UK and “the rate of growth in the number of jobs in PR at all levels has been higher than that of any management function over the last fifteen years”.

So that’s where we have been going wrong. Maybe the promised referendum on PR should address public relations rather than proportional representation.

There are currently 262 university courses in PR on offer in the UK, including such dazzling combinations as PR and dance at the University of Sunderland and PR with sports massage and exercise therapies at the University of Derby. Mind you, the latter also offers PR combined with culinary arts, which would have been just about the perfect grounding for my City career, assuming that it includes a decent wine-tasting module.

I wonder if there is any chance of signing up for a PhD to take my mind off our current political and economic morass?

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.